New York Yankees put on air of alacrity after rainout assures one more day of baseball

The Detroit Tigers and New York Yankees had their ALCS Game 4 postponed Wednesday.AP Photo

DETROIT -- With their formal evisceration delayed at least one day, a deceptively halcyon air overtook the New York Yankees clubhouse Wednesday night after they actually survived a scheduled game night without losing.

They also didn't win, nor did they score any more runs against Detroit Tigers starting pitching than the one they scored in the first three games, before Wednesday's Game 4 was rained out and pushed to 4:07 p.m. today.

This is the professional mirage they have to paint, against the grim reality -- make that grim-reaper reality -- that the haughtiest team in professional sports still has the same nightmarish issues as before the rainout.

Alex Rodriguez's hitting woes haven't vanished, his $25 million-a-year rump is still nailed to the bench unless the Tigers miraculously come up with a left-handed starter to induce Yankees manager Joe Girardi to decide otherwise, there was a new report Wednesday that the Yankees at least flippantly discussed trading him to the Miami Marlins, and finally A-Rod had his lacivious mid-game pick-up methods from earlier this series exposed by sources who told New York media that the player requested a woman's telephone number with a note written on a baseball during Game 1, long before his bat went limp and the Yankees' offense went to mush, too.

Some of the frippery that inevitably surrounds New York sports teams is summed up in that latter factoid, but there is nothing nebulous about the Yankees' problems.

The most popular athlete in New York, Derek Jeter, still has a broken ankle.

One of the starting pitchers, Phil Hughes, left Game 3 with a bad back and his ability to pitch again this series is in doubt.

CC Sabathia, who had his Game 4 start postponed until today, will not pitch again this series and will not match up with Justin Verlander because of it.

And Girardi, with a team both mentally and physically disadvantaged, and just one day after saying following Game 3 that his role is to keep encouraging his players, undoubtedly has taken to the kind of overtinkering which serves as invitation to a second-guessers' cotillion in a city where the ballroom is always lit.

The richest player in baseball is in a platoon with no one to hit against.

Nick Swisher was back in the lineup in right field for Game 3 but was out in Game 2. And he's a switch-hitter.

Curtis Granderson, the ex-Tiger, suddenly found himself in a platoon Wednesday, too. No one knows if the same lineup holds a day later, but Granderson wasn't in it, when Brett Gardner was inserted as the starting center fielder. And the same pitching matchup looms today, the Yankees' Sabathia against the Tigers' Max Scherzer.

"It's just baseball being baseball," Granderson said. "You've got to go with anything and everything that you can. You mix things up, you move guys up and down, move guys in and guys out, whatever you have to do."

Thing is, there is no righty-lefty explanation behind switching Gardner for Granderson, either. Both hit left-handed.

Granderson's response when Girardi told him about the change just before posting the lineup?

"I'll be ready whenever you need me," Granderson said.

The Yankees responded to a rainout with strange alacrity considering the latest jolt that went against them.

If the game had started, then been suspended, it would have been resumed today. The Tigers and Yankees have been through that in the postseason before.

But the Yankees would have been forced to play an entire ALCS without a full start from their staff ace, too.

"You don't want to get four or five innings deep and then lose both starters," Swisher said.

On the downside for the Yankees, even if they manage to win the next two games in Detroit and go home down 3-2, they still have to beat Verlander. And they'll have to do it without Sabathia, barring another rainout after he actually does make a start, because the travel day will be eliminated and he can't start Game 7 on two days' rest.